Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 American independent blaxploitation action thriller film written, co-produced, scored, edited, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles.

No studio would finance the film, so Van Peebles funded it himself, shooting it independently over 19 days, performing all of his own stunts and appearing in several sex scenes, some reportedly unsimulated.

Huey P. Newton celebrated and welcomed the film's revolutionary implications, and Sweetback became required viewing for members of the Black Panther Party.

Police officers interrogate Beetle, seeking to discover Sweetback's whereabouts, rendering him deaf by firing a gun against each ear.

Their helmeted president challenges Sweetback to a duel: asked to decide the weapon and discovering she is a woman, he chooses sex and is judged to win.

As the police trawl black areas for him, they find Sweetback's biological and rather confused mother, who reveals that his birth name is Leroy.

During production on Watermelon Man for Columbia Pictures, Van Peebles attempted to rewrite the script in order to change it from a comedy poking fun at white liberals into the first black power film.

[7] Raucher ultimately exercised a clause in his contract that allowed him to novelize his own script, effectively preventing Peebles from too radically changing the film.

Several actors auditioned for the lead role of Sweetback, but told Van Peebles that they would not do the film unless they were given more dialogue.

Van Peebles contracted gonorrhea when filming one of the many sex scenes, and successfully applied to the Directors Guild in order to get workers' compensation because he was "hurt on the job".

[9][10] Van Peebles and several key crew members were armed because it was dangerous to attempt to create a film without the support of the union.

[9] Van Peebles had received a permit to set a car on fire, but had done so on a Friday; as a result, there was no time to have it filed before shooting the scene.

[9] According to Van Peebles, the dead dogs seen in the film's final scenes were sourced from a humane society: "Boy, were we lucky... At first, the society didn't even think it could help us... but after a little donation, they looked in their refrigerator again, I guess, and found almost exactly what we were looking for..."[11] Van Peebles stated that he approached directing the film "like you do the cupboard when you're broke and hungry: throw in everything eatable and hope to come out on top with the seasoning, i.e., by editing".

"[12] Van Peebles wanted "a victorious film ... where niggers could walk out standing tall instead of avoiding each other's eyes, looking once again like they'd had it".

[12] Van Peebles knew that in order to spread his message, the film "simply couldn't be a didactic discourse which would end up playing ... to an empty theater except for ten or twenty aware brothers who would pat me on the back and say it tells it like it is" and that "to attract the mass we have to produce work that not only instructs but entertains".

Van Peebles also wanted to make a film that would "be able to sustain itself as a viable commercial product ... [The Man] ain't about to go carrying no messages for you, especially a relevant one, for free.

Stephen Holden from The New York Times commented that the film's editing had "a jazzy, improvisational quality, and the screen is often streaked with jarring psychedelic effects that illustrate Sweetback's alienation".

[13] In The 50 Most Influential Black Films: A Celebration of African-American Talent, Determination, and Creativity, author S. Torriano Berry writes that the film's "odd camera angles, superimpositions, reverse-key effects, box and matting effects, rack-focus shots, extreme zooms, stop-motion and step-printing, and an abundance of jittery handheld camera work all helped to express the paranoid nightmare that [Sweetback's] life had become".

"[12] The film's music was performed by the then-unknown group Earth, Wind & Fire, who were living in a single apartment with hardly any food at the time.

[9] By alternating hymn-based vocalization and jazz rhythms, Van Peebles created a sound that foreshadowed the use of sampling in hip hop music.

A notice at the beginning of the DVD states "In order to comply with UK law (the Protection of Children Act 1978), a number of images in the opening sequence of this film have been obscured.

Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times described the film as "a series of stark, earthy vignettes, Van Peebles evokes the vitality, humor, pain, despair and omnipresent fear that is life for so many African-Americans".

[6] The New York Times critic Clayton Riley viewed the film favorably, commenting on its aesthetic innovation, but stated of the character of Sweetback that he "is the ultimate sexualist in whose seemingly vacant eyes and unrevealing mouth are written the protocols of American domestic colonialism".

[28] In a compendium about the Museum of Modern Art's film and media collection, curator Steven Higgins describes the film's place in history: "Not since Oscar Micheaux had an African-American filmmaker taken such complete control of the creative process, turning out a work so deeply connected to his own personal and cultural reality that he was not surprised when the white critical establishment professed bewilderment...[it] depends less on its story of a superstud running from the police than it does on its disinterest in referencing white culture and its radically new understanding of how style and substance inform each other.

"[29] Metroactive's Nicky Baxter's response is mixed: "Sweet Sweetback introduced the biggest and baddest buck of the [blaxploitation era].

Indeed, it can be argued that because it was written, produced and directed by an American-born African outside of Hollywood, the film is not truly part of the blaxploitation genre, yet it cannot be denied that it shares certain thematic similarities.

Bennett argued that the film romanticized the poverty and misery of the ghetto and that "some men foolishly identify the black aesthetic with empty bellies and big bottomed prostitutes."

[33] Bennett described instances when Sweetback saved himself through the use of his sexual prowess as "emancipation orgasms" and stated that "it is necessary to say frankly that nobody ever fucked his way to freedom.

"[33] Poet and author Haki R. Madhubuti (then known as Don L. Lee) agreed with Bennett's assessment of the film, stating that it was "a limited, money-making, auto-biographical fantasy of the odyssey of one Melvin Van Peebles through what he considered to be the Black community.

"[36] Robert Reid-Pharr wrote that "...[Sweetback] was seen (correctly I believe) as the first in a long line of so-called Blaxploitation features..." and goes on to say that Van Peebles was "one of the first artists to bring not only compelling but realistic images of Black Americans into mainstream cinemas, breaking with decades-long traditions ..."[37] In 2004, Mario Van Peebles directed and starred as his father in Baadasssss!, a biopic about the making of Sweet Sweetback.